The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 - A City on a Hill

  CHAPTER 2 - Utopia

  CHAPTER 3 - Exploitationville

  CHAPTER 4 - A Southern Principality

  CHAPTER 5 - The Magic City

  CHAPTER 6 - On the Road to the Consumer Economy

  CHAPTER 7 - The Instant Cities of the Good War

  CHAPTER 8 - A World Transformed

  CONCLUSION

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  PHOTO CREDITS

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  For Maruja

  Introduction

  In 1917 the Pinkerton Detective Agency sent twenty-three-year-old Dashiell Hammett to help break a miners’ strike against the Anaconda Copper Co. in Butte, Montana. Hammett—who would later gain fame for his hardboiled detective fiction, such as The Maltese Falcon—had worked for two years for Pinkerton, tracking stolen property, transporting prisoners, and shadowing suspects. He later said he’d had no political consciousness when he was sent to Butte. But he did discover that he didn’t like strikebreaking.

  The Butte strike was sparked by a mine fire that killed 178 miners. It was led by the radical, syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—the romantic organizer of down-and-outs, miners, lumberjacks, oil-field roustabouts, and immigrant textile workers. The union’s slogan was “One Big Union” in a day when most union “brotherhoods” defined themselves along craft lines and seemed more like fraternities than the embodiment of the cooperative commonwealth. The IWW’s symbol was an arched-back black cat, yowling at the viewer—an image associated with sabotage and machine-breaking in the name of militancy and worker solidarity.

  In Butte, the IWW’s man was Frank Little, a one-eyed, part-Indian whirlwind of an organizer. Known as the “hobo agitator,” he had been at the center of worker struggles in Fresno, San Diego, Duluth, and most of the major IWW conflicts. An Anaconda executive offered Hammett $5,000 to shoot Little—or so Hammett later said—but the young Pinkerton agent declined. No matter. In short order, vigilantes apprehended Little and lynched him at a railroad crossing along with three other perceived troublemakers.

  Hammett decided he’d had enough, quit the detective agency, and joined the U.S. Army.1 But he never forgot Butte, which he later immortalized as “Personville” (nicknamed “Poisonville”) in his first novel, Red Harvest, a crime fiction classic. “The city wasn’t pretty,” he wrote. “The smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.”2 But the biggest stain on Butte, in Hammett’s eyes, may well have been the Anaconda Copper Co. itself.

  Created at the turn of the twentieth century by a charismatic Irishman named Marcus Daly, Anaconda was soon involved in suspect dealings. Standard Oil directors James Stillman, William Rockefeller, and Henry H. Rogers bought the company with borrowed money, renamed it, and quickly resold it to gullible investors, pocketing a profit of $36 million.3 Another early owner was George Hearst, father of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The company passed through various corporate hands and by the 1920s held a virtual monopoly over the mines in and around Butte. The town, once known for gold and silver mining, grew prosperous thanks to the area’s abundant copper, which was increasingly in demand for electrical wiring. Butte attracted workers from around the world—and became known as a wide-open Sin City. Its red-light district, “The Line,” featured hundreds of saloons and houses of prostitution.

  But contrary to this image of freedom and licentiousness, Butte was in fact locked down—totally under Anaconda’s thumb. In Red Harvest, Hammett captures the spirit of the town: “For forty years old Elihu Willsson . . . had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin, and guts. He was president and majority stockholder of the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of The Morning Herald and Evening Herald, the city’s only newspapers, and at least part owner of nearly every other enterprise of any importance. Along with these pieces of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.”

  Hammett’s Willsson was likely a fictional amalgam of many rough-hewn executives of the day. But it’s possible that the author had in mind John D. Ryan, a former department store clerk who succeeded Daly and ran Anaconda until his own death in 1933.

  Anaconda remained hugely powerful not only in the town but across Montana, so much so that in 1946, when reporter John Gunther published his celebrated panorama of American life, Inside U.S.A., he observed, “For years the company dominated both parties, and controlled almost all elections, if necessary by dragging in the ‘cemetery vote.’” Gunther painted a picture of Anaconda as greedy and stingy—keeping other industry out of the area so labor remained cheap, removing far more riches from Montana than it ever put in. “Aside from one threadbare little park . . . it has never given the city of Butte, from which it has extracted a roaring Golconda of wealth, anything,” he wrote.4

  It is companies like Anaconda and the experience of towns like Butte that have tainted a term familiar to us all: company town. To those who like to think of the United States as a sweet land of liberty, the very words sound un-American. A company town seems necessarily to be a place where one business exerts a Big Brother-like grip over the population—controlling or even taking the place of government, collecting rents on company-owned housing, dictating buying habits (possibly at the company store), even administering where people worship and how they may spend their leisure time.

  It’s true: Company towns are un-American—and they are the essence of America.

  The United States has a unique experience with company towns. With its vast expanse of virgin land and a government that has generally taken a laissez-faire attitude toward business, the United States has provided a greater opportunity for developing such settlements than other countries. The United States also has a tradition of social experimentation: If the Pilgrims could construct their ideal City on a Hill, so too could American businessmen create their own communities, from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Pullman, Illinois; Morris Run, Pennsylvania; and Valsetz, Oregon. By one estimate, more than 2,500 single-enterprise towns once dotted the country.

  Trace America’s economic evolution, and you get a tour of company towns—from early textile sites such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire, to today’s company campuses in New York state and California. Along the way, you’ll have to take note of coal towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, and Appalachia; steel towns in the Monongahela River valley and Illinois; Texas and Oklahoma oil camps; shipbuilding centers in Connecticut and California; meatpacking burgs in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota; and the government company town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

  Some of America’s seminal industries have faded from the scene—and along with them, the towns they were associated with have fallen into decrepitude or even disappeared. Hard times are irrevocably associated today with Lowell; Gary, Indiana; the former textile villages of North and South Carolina; and such once-proud meatpacking towns as Ottumwa, Iowa.

  But company towns are not simply a phenomenon of the past: In an age of transnational corporations and exurban sprawl, company towns remain a basic part of American life. They are as near as Corning, New York, and Hershey, Pennsylvania, their products as familiar as Tabasco Sauce, Spam, and Kohler bathroom fixtures.

  And maybe even as familiar
as Google. For in a remote part of Oregon along the banks of the Columbia River, that company recently built a large industrial complex mostly in secret. The facility, known as Project 02, stretches over several acres, with electric-power equipment much in evidence. Given Google’s business, it can hardly be surprising that the prime residents of the campus’s three large buildings are computer servers—perhaps tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks—necessary to keep Google’s search engines and Web services humming. But a few humans are needed, too, if the effort is to be completed and maintained. “The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent, and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people,” wrote the New York Times in 2006.5 That means that fundamentally, what may be coming together in The Dalles, Oregon, is a contemporary—and lowemployment—version of the company town.

  Such towns generally tend toward one of two models, although many fall in between. In this account, I will refer to the Butte model as “exploitationville.” Perhaps the apotheosis of such towns may be found in Appalachian coal country, home of the likes of Lynch, Wheelwright, and Coal Run, Kentucky. The logic behind such places is simple and familiar. It rests on the thinking of every bean counter: Business exists to make a profit, not to coddle employees. Society as a whole benefits most when enterprises are cost-effective, productive, and profitable. The very ruthlessness that surfaced in these places seems less like an inevitable outgrowth of such logic than a willful expression of malicious personalities.

  But another model regularly shows up in the United States, recurring across the decades: ideal communities backed by companies that promise to share their bounty with workers and their families. These utopian towns were and are characterized by modern public buildings, libraries and facilities for leisure, education, and cultural enrichment, and comfortable dwellings for managers and workers. A paternalistic attitude may be present as well—sometimes resulting in a watchfulness toward the citizenry on the part of the company overlords: Such guardians have tended to favor tidiness in housekeeping, sobriety, and oftentimes regular religious observance.

  Although one might expect idealistic experiments to fade as industrial society matured, instead the utopian model has resurfaced again and again. For example, in Pullman, Illinois, the eponymous railroad-car maker in the 1880s erected a model town where “advanced secular Gothic buildings” lined tree-shaded streets. Scotia, California, founded by Pacific Lumber as a rustic forest camp in the 1880s, evolved into a pin-neat, saloon-free Shangri-La amid redwood forests; workers got low rent, full medical benefits, college scholarships for their kids, and more. Hershey, Pennsylvania, built by chocolate man Milton S. Hershey in the early 1900s, featured electrified, centrally heated homes, a free playground and zoo, and a model school for orphan boys supported by a foundation that held a majority of his company’s stock.

  At around the same time, companies began erecting such “industrial satellite towns” as Firestone Park, Ohio (Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.), Alcoa, Tennessee (aluminum producer Alcoa), and Kohler Village, Wisconsin (plumbing-fixture maker Kohler Co.). Such eminent figures as planner Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and architect Irving Gill promoted modernist aesthetics in Torrance, California. But ultimately, the successful model would emulate Britain’s carefully planned garden cities, with their wide, attractive boulevards and balance of space devoted to park-land, residences, and industry. Evoking preindustrial villages, such settlements were very different from the grimly functional early company towns with their strict gridiron of streets and rows of cookie-cutter housing. In general, corporations in this period made a major effort to house their employees: By 1916, a thousand companies were providing housing for 60,000 employees—roughly 3 percent of the U.S. population.6

  In the 1930s, government began to play an ever greater role in housing development, and New Deal figures questioned the propriety of company towns, particularly in the southern textile belt, running from North Carolina down into Georgia. Nevertheless, company-built utopias continued to sprout—notably during the 1940s, when wartime demand led Henry J. Kaiser to transform the bayside village of Richmond, California, into a major shipbuilding area. Kaiser became a pioneer in providing inexpensive, universal health care to his workers with a program that was the forerunner of today’s vast Kaiser Permanente health plan.

  Today, the ideal lives on in such model communities as Columbus, Indiana—home of Cummins Engine and “a veritable museum of modern architecture,” according to Smithsonian Magazine—and Corning, New York—home base of the global high-tech corporation Corning Inc. Such companies openly argue for doing well by doing good—and while a bit of this is intended as public relations and corporate branding, it’s hard to deny that there is also an element of genuine good-spiritedness.

  Most recently, the utopian company town has taken a new form—that of the corporate campus. Both Pepsico’s Purchase, New York, campus and the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, are company town- like in that most all human needs are provided for: gourmet food, barber shops, laundry service, exercise facilities, and even nap rooms at Google. This velvet-glove approach is not without its downside, captured in Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs, in which snack-addicted, servile geeks willingly labor as twenty-four-hour-a-day vassals of Microsoft seigneur Bill Gates. (One worker rhapsodizes: “Bill is wise. Bill is kind. Bill is benevolent. Bill, Be My Friend . . . Please!”) Employees need never leave such a cosseting environment—or ever truly end a working day.

  CHAPTER 1

  A City on a Hill

  Unfitted to some extent for the purposes of commerce by the sand-bar

  at its mouth, see how this river was devoted from the first to the serv-

  ice of manufactures. . . . It falls over a succession of natural dams,

  where it has been offering its privileges in vain for ages, until at last

  the Yankee race came to improve them. Standing here at its mouth,

  look up its sparkling stream to its source . . . and behold a city on each

  successive plateau, a busy colony of human beaver around every fall.

  Not to mention Newburyport and Haverhill, see Lawrence, and Low-

  ell, and Nashua, and Manchester, and Concord, gleaming one above

  the other. When at length it has escaped from under the last of the fac-

  tories it has a level and unmolested passage to the sea, a mere waste

  water, as it were, bearing little with it but its fame.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”1

  “Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton,” observed British historian E. J. Hobsbawm.2 And in the United States, at least in the early going, whoever said cotton mills said water power.

  Postrevolutionary America had no shortage of rivers ripe for industrial exploitation. The first to be utilized for textile production were in Rhode Island, beginning in the 1790s. One observer found: “The manufacturing operations of the United States are carried out in little hamlets, which often appear to spring up in the bosom of some forest, around the water fall which serves to turn the mill wheel.”3

  Americans were determined to go their own way in creating models for industry and society, just as they had created their own political system. But there were two powerful British influences.

  First, the Rhode Island mills employed technology appropriated from the Brits by this country’s most famous intellectual-property pirate, Samuel Slater. Apprenticed as a lad in England to the firm of Arkwright and Strutt and rising to the rank of overseer, Slater made a careful study of that company’s innovative equipment. Then, in 1789, he boarded a ship for America—he concealed his textile experience from the ever-watchful British port officials and traveled in the guise of a simple country fellow. Once in the United States, Slater gained employment at the mercantile firm of Almy and Brown, where he and his assistant built a working water fram
e, similar to the one that spun yarn in the Arkwright factory. Establishing the template for Rhode Island mills, Slater’s first operation was on a small scale, a factory in a rented building next to the Blackstone River at Pawtucket. His workforce: seven boys and two girls, ages seven to twelve.4

  Another key British influence was negative. The creators of the U.S. industry repeatedly invoked images of the foreign city that embodied all they wished to avoid: Manchester, England.

  Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant visiting Britain in 1811, wrote to a friend that “we found the manufacturing towns very dirty” and later remarked on “the great corruption of the highest and lowest classes, and the great number of beggars and thieves.”5 Manchester drew numerous visitors, some perhaps seeking a squalor-induced frisson like what draws today’s tourists to New York and Mumbai. Others, such as Friedrich Engels—whose descriptions written a few years after Lowell’s still have the power to startle and repel—had reform in mind. To Engels, the city seemed to be “an outgrowth of accident” rather than the result of any plan. Amid the “knotted chaos of houses,” he found himself repeatedly subjected to “filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health.” Engels provides his readers with a tour of various working-class neighborhoods in the city. His conclusion: “In such dwellings, only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home.”6

  Manchester’s size multiplied tenfold between 1760 and 1830, by which time it housed 180,000 citizens. Aside from the slums, few could help noting the “hundreds of five- and six-storied factories, each with a towering chimney by its side, which exhales black coal vapour.”7 Another report described “an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the whole place.”8